When I paint a rose I do not always know its name, so it is while I am painting it that I am waiting to be told its name. For this golden yellow rose which was truly bathed in sunlight I couldn’t go past the name ‘Golden Days’.  Not only referring to the colour but the demeanour of the rose as it looks backwards nostalgically to those happier days of youth.

The song Golden Days, from the operetta The Student Prince and 1954 MGM film where it was famously sung by Mario Lanza and mimed by Edmund Purdom, talks of the “sunshine of a happy youth” and “we shall know life has nothing sweeter than its springtime, Golden Days when we’re young, golden days”.

And Jean Rhys is her melancholic,modernist novel, Good Morning, Midnight from 1939 also had a word to say about the fleeting days of happiness in youth “But they never last, the golden days. And it can be sad, the sun in the afternoon, can’t it? ”

I have now found that there is a rose named Golden Days.  It was bred in the Netherlands in 1982, it is a deep yellow, double and is slightly fragranced.  Who knows, maybe my nostalgic Golden Days rose might just be a Rosa ‘Golden Days’.

‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ ,and I hope you find this rose sweet regardless of its name.